U.S. seeks "open door" policy in China

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CORKAMAR as to lead all the people to wealth Students of recent Chinese history were not surprised by President Reagan's recent visit to that country. In late March Chairman Deng Xiaoping had met the Prime Minister of Japan, Yasuhiro Nakasone, to discuss international relations, to assure safety of Japanese investments, and to protect copyright agreements in China. The announced aims of Reagan's visit were similar to those of the Japanese, with the additional intention of selling commercial atomic energy reactors and U.S. arms to the Chinese.

The fact that the top leaders of two of the most advanced capitalist countries in the world visited China within two months reflects their growing fear of Soviet military influence in Southeast Asia and their hope to enlist China as their "client" buffer state in the region. These fears of the United States and Japan have become acute since Vietnam's decision to give the Soviet Union access to the U.S.-built Cam Ranh Bay military installations and to allow Soviet troops to stage amphibious landing exercises.

In addition to sharing the fears of all the western capitalist countries about the "destabilization" of their influence and markets in Southeast Asia and Pacific Basin areas, the United States and its allies continue to salivate over the prospects of "opening up" China as a huge market and source of cheap labor. The Chinese, in turn, are fearful of Soviet hegemony in the area; they have been engaged in sporadic border disputes both on their Russian and Vietnamese borders. In addition China has been supporting rebel forces in Kampuchea, which Vietnam has occupied for five years. China, of course, would also like to make a deal to regain Taiwan.

This kind of geopolitical strategy is routine for advanced capitalist countries. But China?

Revolutions sold out

In the 1950s and 1960s many radicals around the world became enamored with Chairman Mao's revolutionary rhetoric about uncompromising struggle against colonial rule and imperialism. Many of these radicals saw China as the progressive force for world revolution that would bypass the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc countries.

Unfortunately, this vision of China was never true. A review of China's foreign policy since the 1949 revolutiondocumented in Les Evans' book "China After Mao" (Monad Press, 1978)— shows a remarkable consistency. The record shows that except for the two cases in which China justifiably felt directly threatened by U.S. military intervention (Korea in 1950 and Vietnam in 1965), Chinese foreign policy has followed the Stalinist model of accommodation with existing national bourgeois governments, while, all too often, brutally selling out indigenous revolutionary movements.

For example, in 1954 (after the battle of Dienbienphu) the French were decisively defeated in Vietnam. But the Soviet and Chinese leaders agreed with the Western powers (in the Geneva Accords) to partition Vietnam; a decision which unnecessarily delayed the final victory for 25 years.

Similarly, China betrayed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) by directing its accommodation to Sukarno in the early 1960s. Predictably, Sukarno turned on the PKI (as Chiang Kai-shek did to the Chinese Communist PartyCCP-in 1927) and slaughtered between Socialist Action 500,000 and one million PKI members during 1965 and 1966. The PKI has yet to recover from that massacre.

Other betrayals of indigenous revolutionary movements by the CCP occurred in the early 1970s in Ceylon (Sri Lanka)› Pakistan, and the Sudan. The romantic dream of Chinese revolutionary fervor was finally destroyed when China officially readopted the "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence" in 1971, and then invited Nixon to visit in 1972. The symbolism of Nixon's trip to visit Mao was probably more important to both sides than any formal or informal agreement. Since that time the revolutionary rhetoric has ended and all but the most ultraleft Maoists have come to recognize reality.

Little has changed in China's foreign policy since Nixon's visit. China announced its support of NATO, joined the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, refused to support the Angolan MPLA after the South African invasion in 1975, and has supported the repressive Mobutu regime in Zaire and the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. It is widely believed that these decisions were part of a deal for economic investment, technology, and trade with Japan, the United States, and Western European nations.

Gains of revolution jeopardized China's revolution, like Russia's, was accomplished amid the ruins of a warravaged society where capitalism and imperialist influence had virtually collapsed. The threat of direct U.S. military invasion through Korea and the dynamic upsurge of the Chinese masses pushed Mao's CCP to nationalize basic industry, control foreign trade, and institute land reform in a primarily peasant society; i.e., to establish a workers' state.

Remarkable economic and social progress has been made, and, despite constant imperialist hostility, the average Chinese worker or peasant is much better off than before the revolution.

June 1984 These real gains can not be minimized or forgotten. These gains, however, are now in jeopardy, and China could quickly sink back to economic and social chaos.

The basic problem that China has faced is that the leadership of the CCP, starting well before the revolution, became an entrenched bureaucracy in the Stalinist model. Even though this bureaucracy has enjoyed a considerable degree of popular support-earned because of the economic and social progress-it has opted to seek continuing accommodation with the hostile capitalist world around it in order to maintain its control. It has also prevented any form of workers' democracy to develop in China.

This monolithic bureaucratic grip has remained constant despite the swings of internal economic policy and the changes of the palace guard. Even before the revolution, Mao took iron clad control of the CCP, using membership in it as a source of reward and punishment for loyalty and adherence to his policies. The Cultural Revolution, ostensibly aimed at eliminating bureaucratic excesses (other than those of Chairman Mao) consisted, in part, of disciplinary measures to deal with Red Guard students and other dissidents who were challenging Mao.

In a parallel with the Khrushchev revelations, the world first learned about the privileges and excesses of the Chinese bureaucracy when, after Mao's death in 1976, the new chairman, Hua Kuo-feng, jailed and conducted show trials of the "Gang of Four.' These trials were obvious propaganda shows to prepare the Chinese people for a radical change of economic policy; an attempt to solve growing unrest over disappointing agricultural and factory productivity.

These internal economic changes have been remarkable even for the most cynical China watchers. An article by Orville Schell (The New Yorker, Jan. 23, 1984), which appears to agree with other reports from independent sources, describes these changes in some detail. This new policy was rubber stamped in 1978 by the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Central Committee which, characteristically, had no pre-convention debate among rank and file CCP members.

Schell concludes: "Virtually the entire fabric of Maoist ideology and the legacy of agricultural collectivization have been discarded as 'leftist errors. " Businesses, which were completely state owned and directed prior to 1978, have increasingly become independent economic units expected to make "profits" for the state. Privately owned businesses are reported to be shooting up all over China. An April 9, 1984, article in the San Francisco Chronicle says there are 5.8 million registered private enterprises in China; each concern may only legally employ up to five persons who are not allowed to have another job. The state gives employers a "free hand" in setting salaries, benefits, and working hoursan ominous portent of future labor unrest.

A quote from Selected Works by Deng Xiaoping, published last July, said it was now ideologically correct "to make some people rich first so as to lead all the people to wealth?" This complete transformation from conditions in Mao's era, when even the local shoeshine boy worked for the state, is apparently designed to form an "entrepreneurial" form of society where state-owned and private enterprises will compete for customers. Whoever is least efficient will fail.

A May 16,1984, article from the Los Angeles Times quotes Premier Zhao Ziyang as saying that 14 coastal cities will be authorized to offer tax reductions including 100 percent ownership to foreign investors. Zhao was quoted as predicting the "special economic zones" will "form a line along the coast for China's opening to the outside world"" These zones, it was stressed, will demand increased productivity from the Chinese workers, and will provide cheap labor and attractive conditions to foreign capitalists.

So far this decollectivization of the land and the introduction of profit incentives and foreign investment have apparently had a stimulating effect on China's economy. The Chinese government announced that between 1978 and 1982 agricultural output had increased by 7.5 percent. They claim the annual income to the average peasant has more than doubled. Western reporters have on page 5)

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Deng: "ideologically correct to make some people rich first so